Life During Class Wartime (opens in new tab)

Yeah I'm glad somebody's talking about it. Wealth inequality seems like it will be THE defining issue of our lives (accelerated drastically by AI).

I think there are many practical ways to solve it, and would love to see more proposals out there. Instead I tend to see nihilism or division.

> As a resident of a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, the effects of pathological inequality are in my face every day: Bentleys gleaming on the road, ragged people huddled in the rain cadging cash outside the drugstores, thousands homeless.

I also live in a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, and attributing these phenomena to pathological inequality badly misdiagnoses the problem. Most visibly homeless people in wealthy west coast cities are severely mentally ill in ways that prevent them from living a normal life or even living peacefully with other people without some kind of institutionalization, which local authorities are reluctant to do because there's no nice way to institutionalize people.

In some places, it's possible for people with a moderate amount of dsyfunction to be able to scrape together enough resources in order to rent cheap, low-quality housing; but in wealthy west coast cities there is a massive housing shortage that is downstream of decades of underbuilding, so all types of housing are very expensive. The underbuilding was and is mostly driven by large numbers of middle-class homeowners who primarily care about the negative externalities of construction and density affecting the place where they live and own their own homes.

Neither of these problems has much to do with extremely wealthy people, or wealth inequality in a general sense.

For the vast majority of human civilization, all taxes were based on wealth. Your emperor, pharaoh, czar, or whoever was in charge sent a dude around to take a bit of everybody's stuff. Not how much income they made but how much stuff they actually had. It's only been the last 120-ish years that the idea that wealth and income were totally different things as far as taxation is concerned emerged.

I think almost everybody would be better off if taxes were something like 1% of total assets rather than off the top of your income.

Reversing Citizens United, publicly funding elections, installing a functional regulatory regime and equitable taxation would go a long way.

Perhaps we could also engage in less ill considered military adventurism as well? Causing a domestic affordability crisis as a distraction and a salve for one's ego seems like a bad idea.

Increased taxation would be defensible if it was paired with spending reform. Increasing the tax to just inflate a bureaucracy helps nobody. Increasing the tax and then directly paying people, with no PMC in the middle, seems win-win-win.

Regarding the IMF report, is it actually harder to hide wealth than income, or is it that there are so few global taxes on wealth that nobody's currently bothering to hide it? It seems like income, being a continuous series of transactions, would be the more difficult of the two.

OK, sure, tax wealth of the rich -- if you can somehow outdo their self-interested political action. Even the most extreme viable wealth taxes proposals target ~2%.

My question is really the economic efficiency of their other 98%, which is becoming about half of available resources.

I suspect the evidence would show their investment gains are less from productivity and more from coordinated extractions, and that there are severe limitations that come from consolidated decision-making (after all, the premise behind the market is that the collective is smarter than the king). Not to mention that buckets of money probably are also alienating and defeat healthy self-discipline, particularly for the next generation.

I would love instead to find that new money seeks and creates new opportunities, particularly those that are beyond what you can convince collectives to do.

It's pretty obvious that ants threatening elephants won't go far, but (to abuse the analogy) I suspect elephants would take helpful hints. Expanding wealth inequality should make it easier for great ideas to take off, so perhaps that's a better focus.

A fairer way would be requiring all excess profits be invested in hard assets like factories, infrastructure etc. capital should be forced into competition and create excess capacity.

I agree with this. I think the point that's often missed about taxing the ultra-wealthy is it incentivizes them to work through people more instead of doing it all themselves. This is a good incentive.

E.g., if I have no noticeable tax on my wealth as I create impact for the world through my companies I'm going to keep being the one person in charge of that (to achieve my mission of reaching mars, etc.). But if I'm going to get nicked (to the tune of billions of dollars even at 2% etc), on average I'm going to redeploy my assets via people I trust in the company etc. I might even invest more in public welfare projects. It is fair arguably that there is this forcing function because one's value accrues from those projects originally. So there is an elegant symmetry at the end too.

It would be unfair to tax billionaires more if they truly worked in a vacuum and provided value to the economy through very few dependencies. But that's never the case. And right now too much excess is spent on things like these sport teams via inherited wealth etc.

I'm very surprised that Tim Bray isn't part of the richest 0.1%.

The seemingly lack of any source for the first illustration (share of wealth) troubles me...

Do you really understand class war? Your suggestion is having the state legislate this away as if the state isn't fully compromised by the capitalist class?

This is the main lesson of the 20th century that liberals refuse to accept; that the state is controlled by capitalist class interests. Capitalist democracy is a curated racket.

And even if we were to force legislation exactly as described above it can't and hasn't lasted long due to the incentives ($billions) to undo it. They will go as far as to kill people for this, and they have.

Legislation does NOT fundamentally change existing power relations. They have this shit in their pockets and you're just saying that we should have them take it out of their pockets.

The western allergy towards Marxism is one of the most detrimental cultural positions the working class has EVER faced.

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this sort of article is ragebait for me. i dont understand how as a society we can let this sort of inequality run rampant. i mean i understand the mechanisms ofc but not the apathy. a wealth tax sounds like a great solution. people can still focus on acquiring stuff, we dont have to worry about how they hide the income and the theyll barely notice the tax anyway. then we'll have enough state money to care for these supposedly "mentally ill" people living on the streets. healthier happier society. as the article states: "no need for guillotines. yet".

In Europe governments make up such a big part of GDP now in some cases nearly half of it that it becomes silly to talk about the evil capitalist. We should be talking about the graft and poor spending of that money.

Inequality is rising, but is absolute wealth also rising? Median incomes inflation adjusted?

The elephant in the room is why governments need more money: old age benefits like social security. I fear that taxing wealth will just be a tax on future investment while funnelling that wealth to the elderly. Already, folks are pushing to make the key asset owned by the old - housing - free from property taxes (if you're over 60, naturally)[1] which will only push housing prices up and drive more budget deficits that needs fresh tax revenue.

I don't expect Social Security (or my country's equivalent) to exist in anything like its current form when I'm old enough to retire. This is the last hurrah and it's shocking how we're pulling out all the stops to make it happen.

[1] https://www.sos.ca.gov/administration/news-releases-and-advi...

Y'all can say violence isn't the answer all you like, but not addressing this will cause violence. Mass, misguided, idiotic violence of the like few of us can imagine.

Either we make significant change whilst we still have some capacity to reason, or we consign ourselves to the fate of animals, following our impulse gradients to the places they invariably lead.